After more than a decade of getting a serious level of excitement by simply making a trade, even if the net profit per share was a penny or two, I always knew that someday I wouldn’t be able to sustain the kind of maintenance that it took to keep on an eye on a portfolio.

Even worse, I knew that someday I wouldn’t have the kind of time and attention that it took to keep an eye on multiple portfolios, especially when those portfolios may have had different goals and tolerances for risk.

Like most people, I always looked at investing and investment philosophy as being on a continuum.

The difference is that while most conventional wisdom believed that the continuum started with mutual funds or their modern-day equivalent, the ETF, and then ended with the safety of fixed income instruments, I never wanted any part of mutual funds, nor bonds.

For older people, like me, bonds were obligatory, but I never could figure them out. I just didn’t understand them and got a headache even thinking about the inverse world that bond traders inhabited.

While it’s not entirely lost upon me that call sellers and put sellers may live in an inverse universe, as well, those seem much easier to understand and negotiate.

Anyway, my children are at the early stage of this continuum. They can take lots of risk.

One of those kids has a portfolio that aggressively uses covered options, just as I had done for a long time and he is doing very, very well.

The other is riding the market’s wave and is doing very, very well, too.

Both are involved with individual stocks and have by-passed Index Funds and ETFs, altogether. read more

Well, the One Year Anniversary of the newest iteration of TheAcsMan is coming up soon tomorrow.

For the very, very few that have been following along ever since 2007 or so with Szelhamos.com and then the original TheAcsMan.com, you may recall that both shuttered on the one year anniversary date.

OptionToProfit.com went on for 5 years, but this time around, it’s time to revert to old ways again and TheAcsMan comes to its end in a few weeks tomorrow upon the occasion of its first anniversary.

But, in the works is LEAPToProfit.com which reflects where I always knew I would be eventually headed with my investing habits.

That means less trades, even less writing than I do now.

Just less, but at this phase, adding a couple of a percent onto returns of a Buy and Hold portfolio works for me, just as actively trading worked for a younger me.

For anyone interested, here is an article that lays out the strategy. It was written a number of years ago, so the names of the companies may be different in 2018, but the idea is the same.

It is 5 years old and I’ve refined my rules a bit, but if you’re ready to just sit back and not worry about market declines or missing out on rallies, this is the way to go when you are at the capital preservation stage of life.

So, as tonight ushers in the New Year, thanks for sticking with me one more year.

The “Jerky boys of Russia” have struck again, and this time the Russian comedy duo targeted U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley, engaging her in a conversation about a fictional island in the South China Sea. According to a report in the Hill, the two comedians, Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexei Stolyarov, uploaded a video…

This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site. President Trump delivered a new “ National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (NSS) last week, and it elicited a mountain of comment. I thought I’d wait a week to let the dust settle, and then add my own. The criticisms of the…

This article first appeared on the Council on Foreign Relations site. President Trump delivered a new “ National Security Strategy of the United States of America” (NSS) last week, and it elicited a mountain of comment. I thought I’d wait a week to let the dust settle, and then add my own. The criticisms of the…

It’s the most stressful time of the year but adults are looking to Santa Claus to ease their holiday anxiety. Joseph Rembisz, a 71-year-old who plays Santa at the midtown Manhattan Bloomingdale’s, has said that many adults come in during the middle of the day to discuss their troubles. The American Psychological Association found that 63…